Ok, so I wanted to spend last Sunday to setup a network between my Linux box and the two Windows XP things that are occupying my household. Then I played some Doom and now it's Thursday...
I have never set up a network before. I know by now that samba etc is going to help me but my question is: Is my router (D-Link DI-704P) able to do that? Right now, we are using it to share a broadband connection. Can I use it for networking? And if yes, is there an easy way to verify this, to check if I can "see" the other PCs?
Here's a link to the bugger D-Link DI-704P

Obviously the first thing you want to know is
whether IP as such can see the other boxes.
To the router it doesn't matter what kind of
information the packages carry, whether you
get a smb-package or a http-one is all the same.
(Unless it does firewalling, too, and you explicitly
block certain things).

Does your router give you a dynamic IP, or
do you use a fixed one?

And really, this thread belongs in Networking,
which is where I'll put it now :)


Cheers,
Tink

stranger777, Any router can do networking. As Tinkster said, the router doesn't care what passes through.

Networking is based on IP addresses. every computer That is connected to your router has an IP address. An IP address identifies the computer on a network.

Now depending on how your router is configured, you may already have a network and not know it. If the router is running a DHCP server you most likely have a network. (most routers run DHCP by default.)

To take advantage of the network you can install Samba to share files, and such . (samba would interact with various operating systems that connect to linux. The most popular is connecting Linux to Windows.)

You can see if the computers can "see"
each other by going to a Windows computer : Start|run|cmd|net view. if you see the computer names of the XP computers then you know they can communicate with each other. (Linux should be able to communicate as well. Its just faster to check with the Windows computers since they run the same operating system.)

it`s all easy-peasy u just have to stop playing doom for an hour or less and get stuck into ur networking prob!

Thanks for all your help (esp. mermxx who pinpointed the real problem here... ;-) ) I somehow believed some guy that my router wasn't able to do what I wanted it to do.
Did the net view thing - and yes, I can see the other XP machine. Thanks NetAX!
Thanks for moving the thread, Tinkster, I myself am not able to post in anything but newbie. It's way too scary out there in the real forum with all the gurus and stuff. ;-)

I just love a happy ending :-) Glad u got it sorted